Community of Practices (CoP's) for Agile Success

Concept of CoP - was first proposed by cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991. A CoP can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally.

What is Community of Practice?

Communities of practices (CoPs) are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it in better way as they interact regularly. CoP's are the combination of three distinct characteristics, all must be present for a group to meet the definition of a COP and Community of Practice depicted as below.

IMO–The CoP can be defined as:

? A group of people with common Interest

? A group of people with common goal of improving

? A group of people who share experience (Domain, Experience and Practice)

What we care about?

The Domain - A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.

What we do together about?

The Community - In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.

Who cares about it?

The Practice - The members of a community of practice are practitioners, they develop a shared list of resources( experiences, stories, tools and ways of addressing recurring problems) in short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

What are the Characteristics of a (CoP)?

? Formally committed to an organizational domain ex- architecture, user experience, quality assurance etc.

? A virtual team with shared interest and competence span across multiple agile teams with a community "lead”

? Self-organizing

? Carry a community backlog

? Building block for Agile Governance

Why a Community of Practice (CoP)?

There are many skills and experiences to learn from each other throughout the organization. CoP’s will enable, establishing and participating through groups will give us a conduit to leverage the knowledge across the organization by following ways

• Sharing techniques with one another – CoP members will often share techniques with one another through face-to-face conversations (perhaps a lean coffee session), chatting in discussion forums, practitioner presentations (such as a lunch-time presentation).
• Supporting one another's learning – By sharing and discussing the common challenges, frustrations and ideas to improve on, and good Practices some of these meeting turn in to working sessions where they flush these experiments out to begin using them. The feedback from running these experiments are discussed in a follow-up meeting by (Inspect and adapt) or to focus on another experiment to solve that particular challenge.
• Capture Techniques - Some CoP’s will choose to start capturing the techniques and strategies that they learn and share with one another, typically in an informal manner using either a wiki or documentation repository such as Microsoft Sharepoint.

Typical CoP Structure Looks Like

Role Based CoP’s across Cross Functional Teams

This is most common model of a CoP of any organization; ex- scrum masters from different teams may from a COP to exchange facilitation best practices and experiences in building highly productive Agile teams.

Organizing and Operating a CoP

CoPs are highly organic and have a natural life cycle that begins with an Idea for a new community and ends by achieving its objectives or is no longer providing value. Since CoP’s are informal and self-organizing by nature, members are empowered to design the type and frequency of interactions. For developers this could be hackathon’s, coding dojos and tech talks. Other formats like lean coffee, meetups, brown bags, webinars and asynchronous communications through social business platforms such as slack, confluence, jive, etc. In the operating stage the CoP members continuously evolve using periodic retrospectives and core team members focusing on maintaining the health of the community by keeping things simple and informal.

Final Thoughts on CoP’s for Trizetto -

1. CoP's are mission critical Initiatives for an Agile organization or CoP’s are the “need not a choice” with Agile mindset for Lean Agile Leaders.

2. The primary role of Lean Agile Leader’s should support the skilled workers to start the CoP’s across T3 if not exists and communicates the value and highlight the success stories of CoP’s and recognize the efforts of CoP volunteers, This helps the enterprise and builds the intrinsic motivation of the knowledge workers.

3. Empower CoP's to provide knowledge workers with opportunities beyond their assigned tasks on an ART's - Agile Release Trains to experience Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose that helps to deliver the best.

4. Embrace CoP practitioners with the venue to exchange knowledge and skills with community members across T3 Product portfolio.

5. Through CoP’s the cross pollination provides access to a wide range of expertise to help with technical challenges, fuels continuous improvement and empowers more meaningful contributions to the larger goals of the T3.

References: Wiki, Agile helpline, cultivate culture of CoP & Disciplined Agile, SAFe, etc.

Thanks for reading this article and please share your feedback.